For you who followed the blog ‘From Bali with Love – The BaliFied game development story part 1’ here comes the second part! This time we decided to change things around and my wife Joan has written this part.​

The SituationMy husband keeps on surprising me. After reading his blog about the BaliFied game development, it reminded me of what a big achievement he already gained this far: starting up a new company and this time, with his wife instead of business partners. I can assure you that it’s a whole different experience to work together with your better half! As two founders of Dragon Game Studio, we are together 24/7 business wise and outside… I honestly think that not a lot of couples choose this lifestyle, knowing how much (extra) headache it can add. But somehow it works for us. As long as we keep the patience and a positive attitude by always listen to each other’s opinion, we’re fine ☺

​On the work floor I let my husband run the show and I’m there to stand by with my opinion and advice. I’m sharing my thoughts with the team on the projects and I keep myself busy with social media, other aspects of online marketing and game research. Yes, playing Clash of the Clans is game research haha… This position is completely new to me. I have a Bachelor in Marketing Communication and had several positions in that field. I also had many different jobs in all kinds of other industries. But being CEO at the present time wasn’t really a choice, but rather something for me to do. Besides standing by my husband during this new adventure of ours, it’s not only fun, it also gives me the freedom I need to prepare for the lifestyle of my role as Mum-to-be, which will be in a couple of months…

The TeamI’ll tell you a bit about how we managed to gather our talented team. We are now with 8 people (including ourselves): Five full time staff and one intern. All are highly educated young Indonesians. The first one that joined us, turned out to be the person we bought one of our dogs from. He had similar interests, a matching education and… he was looking for a job. Surprising how paths can cross!

After some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) by Jonas, other serious, qualified and experienced candidates found their way to Dragon Game Studio’s website. The applicants were willing to move from all over of Indonesia to start their new adventure with us in Bali. I guess we have that in common with our team: we attract people with a great spirit, who dare to be adventurous, go with their gut feeling of what feels right and simply do what makes life FUN. Working on something that’s fun is hardly called work, right?

We took the second potential candidate very seriously since he had worked at Gameloft, a big international game company. We flew together with my brother who was visiting us back then, and with our first employee to Surabaya for an interview. As we hoped for, everything went very well and we came to a mutual agreement. He is now our Art Director. I feel extremely lucky that things turned out the way they did for us, so far… The Dream Team was completed not long after we found our Art Director and here we are now: a full team including two Programmers, both already living in Bali, our Art Director and Studio Manager/Game Designer, who are both from Surabaya and a Graphic Designer from Tasikmalaya.

I believe it’s very important to build a good relationship with your team. To gain and build mutual respect and make it possible to work every day on a game that everybody is happy with. Our motto is “Life is Wonderful, let our games be part of it” and that being said, we try to create a good environment for the team at the office with a gaming room, latest consoles and game releases. From time to time we also organize karaoke nights, snorkel trips, have some Bintangs, grab a movie together, etcetera. We treat them like family and they do the same with us.

The DevelopmentI can’t write too much about game development itself, since I’m really a noob here so forgive me if the description’s a bit poor… here’s what I can tell you about BaliFied: it’s being developed with Corona SDK. Corona is an awesome software development kit that can easily implement all the features and gameplay that we wanted for BaliFied. The programming language that Corona uses is LUA, and was very easy for our programmers to understand and learn. We were off to a flying start just a week after our senior programmer joined us! The only reason it has taken us 3 months to get where we are today is because both my husband and I are perfectionists, and insisted on changing the GUI (Graphical User Interface) many times. With that said, we are now more than happy with the current GUI & it’s soon time to pick up the BaliFied development again. We took a few weeks break from it to do something else for a while. That resulted in our other upcoming game Don’t Steal My Banana which is finished now and will be released in the middle of March 2013.

I learned that, with my zero background in game development, all you need to do is to gather the right people, with the right skills and let them work their magic! Sometimes when we are discussing things and the guys throw in some terms I never heard about before, I just nod my head and a minute later I am Googling to find out exactly what they were talking about

As Jonas told you in the previous blog post, BaliFied is based on the old board game ‘Bali’ from MB. We gave it a huge twist by improving the game rules, made it visually attractive by adding backgrounds that highlight Bali’s characteristics, added special actions that will make the gameplay even more exciting & turned it into a social game which gives the user the possibility to play against anyone in the world.

If one day you will come and visit Bali, you are welcome to step by our studio and meet the Dragon Dream Team that I’m so proud of.

With our two upcoming games, BaliFied and Don’t Steal My Banana we hope to entertain the casual gamers of all ages coming from Bali, further and beyond….

Thanks for your time to read this, and on behalf of our entire team, many thanks for your support and spreading the love.

Read more about our projects on Facebook and Twitter and feel free to like and/or follow us:

Wishing you a wonderful time where ever you are, and keep smiling.

​ Joan JohnssonFounder & CEO

It’s finally time. After more than a year of planning, living, breathing, obsessing, LOVING BaliFied…. it’s time to introduce our upcoming word game to the world! Even though the actual game production started in September 2012, the real story started long before that. To make you understand why we decided to build a game with a theme like this, I have to go a bit personal and start from the beginning:

The backgroundIt’s May 2011. My wife Joan (who has Dutch Indonesian roots) and I just held our dream wedding in Uluwatu, Bali. This is my third time visiting Bali, the wonderful Island of the Gods. I knew since the very first time I visited Bali, that this place would be forever special to us. The first time we visited I proposed to Joan at a beach in Seminyak (May 2010). The second time we came back to plan our wedding (January 2011). The third time, exactly one year after my proposal, I said ‘I do’ to the love of my life Joan, at our beautiful cliff-side wedding in Uluwatu. (May 2011). Before getting married my wife and I had been playing with the idea of buying property in Bali. We had seen the most amazing villas online, costing a fraction of what it would in Europe. After our marriage we had some free time on our hands and we were curious if the places actually looked as good in real life as they did on the photos, so we contacted a few real estate agencies. What started as something we did “just for fun” turned into an almost unhealthy obsession to find our dream villa. After three months and viewing more than 40 different villas, going multiple times back and forth between Europe and Bali, dealing with all kinds of people, from the kindest to the sleaziest, we finally found it: our dream villa! Since we were fortunate enough to have somewhat of a financial security, we bought it and started to plan our move from Europe to Bali, Indonesia. In October 2011 it was time. Our great life adventure was about to begin. Bali here we come!

The business​As soon as we arrived in Bali I planned to start up some kind of business. I didn’t know exactly what, but I knew that being my own boss is what I desired to continue with. I’ve been running my own business since 1997 and it’s like second nature to me. Even though starting a business in Bali is a quite the different process than what it is in Europe, it turned out to be the right choice. After reading various “How to build an App” books I was sure that this was what I wanted to do. Developing apps, more specifically: games. Playing computer & video games has always been a great passion of mine, and still is. These days I tend to play more games on my iPhone and iPad for obvious reasons, but I still love to fire up the PS3 or Xbox360 for some more intense gaming sessions whenever I have the time. Anyway, the idea was there, time to put it in motion! I had an idea what I wanted to do, but it was still a long way to go. Everything had to be taken care of, from coming up with a name for the company, to take care of all the practical BS that comes with setting up a business. Luckily I had my loving wife by my side to support and help me whenever I needed it. Without her nothing of this would have been possible and I thank my lucky star that she is just as spontaneous and “crazy” as I am. So there we were, my wife and I, trying to come up with a name for our future business. After a whole lot of name ideas back and forth, we finally decided to go with the name Dragon Game Studio. Partly because my wife is a Dragon, her Chinese zodiac that is, and 2012 was going to be the year of the Dragon. And of course also simply because Dragons are totally awesome. Now when we had the name of our company decided it was time to move on to the next step. What kind of game should we make? And how? None of us had any previous game development experience what-so-ever. All we had was our dreams and passion to accomplish something great, something out of the ordinary… and of course our gaming experiences from all the countless hours we spent playing games against each other. With that in mind we knew that it would be a very, very hard task, but we still had our mind set on doing it, and doing it right.

The game​Both my wife and I are HUGE word game fans. It started with Bookworm from PopCap and grew into something much bigger. We became hooked on games such as Words with Friends, Wordfeud & Ruzzle etc. Looking at the success of these games and our love for them, it was obvious that it was a social word game we had to make! After doing a lot of research about word games, both board games & digital, I came across an old board game with the name “Bali”. What are the odds?! Finding out there’s an old word / card game from the 1950′s, with the same name as the island that you are so connected to, the mysterious island of the Gods that you love, the island that you just moved to start your new life at! Let’s just say I don’t believe in coincidences….

And as that wasn’t enough, the reviews that I read on boardgamegeek.com showed that people actually really liked the game, and were sad to see it being taken out of production somewhat 20 years ago. They referred to it as a game for word connoisseurs, a game that’s more challenging and more fun than Scrabble. That sounded good to me! I managed to track down an old copy from the 1970’s edition (actually new, still in plastic) and bought it.How the story continues, how we found our Dragon Dream team of super talents, and how we succeeded to build a completely new type of word game, you can read about in my next post coming soon: From Bali with Love – The BaliFied game development story part 2.

​Below you’ll meet our beloved mascot named Ulu (from Uluwatu). He will guide the player through the game, encourage them if they do something good and tease them if their opponent does something to hurt their game such as stealing a word.

Stay tuned, and please check us out on Facebook. Like us to keep up to date with the development process & communicate with the team behind BaliFied – Word Game of the Gods. We’ll keep posting screenshots, updates & news about the upcoming beta testing.